Page 399 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 18 March 2014
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made a difference to many Canberrans. In December of last year the team that takes care of the grant payments was given a note from a mother who had received funding to purchase waterproof hearing aids for her nine-year-old son. The mother wrote that as her son tried them out in the bath he emerged with a beaming smile as he told her, “I can hear bubbles. It’s so cool I can hear underwater.”
The thought of this young child hearing bubbles is really quite magical but the provision of waterproof hearing aids also means that this young boy can more safely join his classmates in swimming and other sporting activities in which regular hearing aids cannot be used in case they get wet.
As was the case in the first round, we achieved our aim in the second round of reaching the broadest population of eligible Canberrans. Between the two rounds 184 Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people applied. Of those applicants, 72 per cent were offered a grant; 84 humanitarian or refugee entrants to Australia applied, and of those 86 per cent were offered a grant; 593 people who identified a psychosocial disability as their primary disability applied for a grant, and of those people 41 per cent received a grant. Applications were also received from younger people living in residential care. Each of those individuals who applied was offered a grant.
The enhanced service offer grants were intended to achieve a few important aims. Firstly, they were about providing vital additional assistance to people with a disability in the ACT for whom we know there remains great unmet need. The impact of the deficits within the current service system results in tremendous personal pressure on many citizens with a disability and by virtue of the reduced financial, social and educational participation people with disability experience there is lost opportunity to the individual, their families and to our community as a whole.
So the grants were also about providing much-needed assistance to the families and other unpaid carers who share this journey and the financial, physical and emotional strains that accompany it. Through these grants we have provided some additional assistance to a significant proportion of eligible Canberrans and some relief to their families. Secondly, these grants are about supporting the ACT to prepare for the introduction of the NDIS. The first part of that preparation was getting the message out to people that the NDIS was coming and it might relate to them. The challenge was getting that message out to the broadest possible group, to people who may not see that they have a disability or be eligible for supports, to people who, for a wide variety of reasons, are not connected to any of the formal support services which are currently available to them.
I understand that through the assessment process applicants were identified who were in urgent need and were not well connected to sometimes essential services. These people were able to be immediately contacted and assisted. Indeed, between the two rounds of the enhanced service offer grants, 526 applicants told us that they had not received any formal service.
Through the results of the 2012-13 disability client satisfaction survey, which measured client satisfaction with all disability services funded by Disability ACT,
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